Businesses rely more and more on the cloud to keep their applications running and data accessible. However, a high percentage of websites have vulnerabilities that may lead to the theft of data such as credit card information and customer lists. Business needs application security solutions to avoid business interruptions and costly lawsuits. The software developers have historically focused on security vulnerabilities and other serious functionality issues in the software that may be exploited by hackers. Despite the efforts, the security vulnerabilities remain as serious threats in the application level.
Various methods have been developed to identify security vulnerabilities in applications, such as black-box testing and static code analysis. Static code analysis is used by the software developers to analyze software for problems and inconsistencies before actually compiling the source code and executing programs built from the code for the software, and such technique is aimed at locating and describing areas of security vulnerabilities in the source code. Most high-level optimizations performed by a modern compiler involve static analysis such as code path analysis, which is used to detect the propagation of an object and further validate the legality along a code execution path. Static code analysis is differentiated from dynamic analysis techniques by analyzing the source code for dependencies without relying on dynamic events in a more complete view of every possible execution path rather than some aspects of a necessarily limited observed behavior.
Several existing static code analysis tools are capable of scanning the source code by leveraging predefined security rules such that potential vulnerabilities are detected and reported to the software developers. The vulnerability report may be accompanied by generic remediation criteria, which proposes ways in which the software developers can amend the source code so as to mitigate the reported vulnerabilities. Nonetheless, the software developers still need to implement and validate the problematic source code manually, which may be labor-intensive in consideration of a large amount of existing applications. Due to lack of time or resources, many stakeholders are forced to deploy the applications even knowing they have potential security issues.